Friday, June 16, 2017

Mosul’s Library Without Books

ROBIN WRIGHT

I could smell the acrid soot a block away. The library at
the University of Mosul, among the finest in the Middle East, once had a
million books, historic maps, and old manuscripts. Some dated back centuries,
even a millennium, Mohammed Jasim, the library’s director, told me. Among its
prize acquisitions was a Quran from the ninth century, although the library
also housed thousands of twenty-first-century volumes on science, philosophy,
law, world history, literature, and the arts. Six hundred thousand books were
in Arabic; many of the rest were in English. During the thirty-two months
that the Islamic State ruled the city, the university campus, on tree-lined
grounds near the Tigris River, was gradually closed down and then torched.
Quite intentionally, the library was hardest hit. Isis sought
to kill the ideas within its walls—or at least the access to them.

On a rainy day this spring, I walked the muddy and eerily
deserted university grounds, in eastern Mosul. I turned a corner and saw the
library, a block-long building, charred
black and its shell strewn, inside and out, with splintered glass,
burnt beams, heat-warped furniture, toppled shelves, and mounds of ashes. In
December, as the Iraqi Army pushed into Mosul, Isis fighters
had set the library alight. The books had served as kindling.

“My life’s work,” Jasim said, when we spoke by telephone two
weeks ago. “I’d rather my house be destroyed, not the library. All my memories,
all the people we helped there—we helped develop the city and the country.
Whenever I speak about the library, it’s as if I’m putting my hand on an open
wound.”

Despite enduring dictators, an extremist rampage that
reconfigured Iraq’s borders, and three long wars over the course of four
decades, Iraqis are known for their intellectual curiosity and literacy.
There’s a famous saying in the Middle East: “Books are written in Egypt,
printed in Lebanon, and read in Iraq.” For centuries, private home libraries
were considered a sign of class. After the University of Mosul was founded, in
1967, sixty of the city’s largest private libraries donated their historic
collections to the new campus library, Jasim told me. Those volumes
are all gone now, too.

Isis had already destroyed Mosul’s central
library, the other major resource center in Iraq’s second-largest city, which
was once a cosmopolitan melting pot of disparate religions and ethnicities.
Irina Bokova, the director-general of Unesco, called it “the systematic destruction of heritage and
the persecution of minorities that seeks to wipe out the cultural diversity
that is the soul of the Iraqi people. Burning books is an attack on the
culture, knowledge and memory.”

The future of the university, especially its library, is a
microcosm of the challenge facing Iraq after the ouster of Isis fighters
and the end of their pseudo-caliphate. It’s one thing to erect four walls to
rebuild shattered homes; it’s another to re-create institutions.

As I walked the university grounds that day, the only sounds
were from bombs, mortars, artillery, and automatic rifles across the Tigris, in
western Mosul. Every building on campus was damaged. The main boulevard had
been bombed by the U.S.-led coalition, one of many streets in Mosul hit preemptively
to slow the potential advance of Isis suicide bombers from
university grounds. One of the bombs had left a huge crater spanning the
street. The only other people on campus were members of a small demining team
from the Iraqi Army. One of its heavy armor-plated vehicles had gotten stuck in
the mud trying to get around the crater.

The previous day, the demining team had dismantled thirteen
booby-trapped bombs left by Isis in classrooms, hallways,
offices, even wastebaskets, Captain Ahmed Hamid Jebur told me. The
workers had defused six more bombs the morning before we met. The team
showed me the translucent trip wires—as thin as dental floss—connected to
shells from a fifty-seven-millimetre anti-aircraft gun. The bomb has been
crudely improvised from disparate parts, hence the name improvised explosive
devices, or I.E.D.s, now the hallmark of extremist movements across the Middle
East and South Asia. Jebur showed me videos on his cell phone of his team
finding, then dismembering, the bombs. This footage was the only official
record. He had lost several men clearing out I.E.D.s left behind by Isis.

Jebur and his men volunteered to take me through several
buildings that they had cleared, including the science department. Isis reportedly
used the labs there to work on basic versions of chemical weapons. The
Iraqi Army had just removed the last I.E.D.s in the department—or so the team
believed. With no electricity on campus, the only light inside any of the
buildings was from our cell phones.

The demining team was bolder than I in its movements.
As we maneuvered through heaps of debris, I worried about trip
wires. “Come,” Jebur encouraged me.

The hulking library was the most haunting of the buildings.
Jebur and two of his men, rifles slung over their shoulders, led me through it.
The only sign of what it had been was an occasional scrap of paper from a book,
its edges burned brown, on the ground. Chronicles and records of Mosul’s rich
past—which dates to antiquity—perished along with the books. Jebur kept shaking
his head as he surveyed the scorched facility.

The University of Mosul, which enrolled forty thousand
students in peacetime, wants to reopen for the new school year in October, the
university's president, Obay al-Dewachi, told me by phone. After the Isis blitz
into Iraq from Syria, in mid-2014, many faculty members and students fled
Mosul, mainly to northern Kurdistan. In exile, staff organized makeshift
classes in motels, in Kirkuk and Dohuk. The obstacles of returning to Mosul are
daunting: tens of thousands of families have to decide whether to go back to a
city that is physically ravaged, politically dysfunctional, and lacking a
working economy or electricity. At the university, parts of the campus will
require a massive cleanup. “Windows and doors are broken even in buildings not
destroyed,” Dewachi told me. Other departments will have to be rebuilt from
scratch. Security will be an issue, too. The growing fear in Mosul is that Isis will
sneak suicide bombers back into the city, as it has done to other parts of Iraq
under the control of the government in Baghdad.

Then, there’s the problem of books. On May 25th, students
organized a book drive outside the gutted library, even as battles
between the Iraqi Army and Isis militants echoed from across
the river. Four young musicians performed in front of the library steps. Three
students pinned their photographs of people and places and life in Mosul on a
long clothesline and recounted the stories behind them. Four painters displayed
their work, propped on easels. The event was the brainchild of Mosul Eye, a
pseudonymous historian and blogger who chronicled life under Isis rule
until he fled Iraq, last year. (He spoke on the condition of anonymity, since
he still has family in Mosul.) Before the Isis invasion, in
2014, he spent long hours in the library each week doing research, he told me.
From abroad, he’s now trying to coordinate a cultural rebirth in Mosul,
beginning with its university.

The price of admission to the student festival was a book.
The kids collected several dozen volumes, Tahany Saleh, a graduate student
in economics and one of the organizers, told me by phone. The library still has
a long way to go.

A few international groups have offered to help. In Europe,
the group Solidarity and Cooperation in the Mediterranean (Entraide
et Coopération en Méditerranée) pledged fifteen tons of books and a
container full of tables and chairs. “We get universities from all over France
to contribute,” Mohamed Hermi, a Tunisian-born lawyer in Marseilles, who runs
the volunteer organization, told me. In the United States, the Iraqi-American
Reconciliation Project, headquartered in Minneapolis, has been in contact
with Mosul Eye about contributing books, too. Boston University has also
reached out, as have smaller groups in Britain.

“We have only promises, frankly speaking,” Jasim cautioned.
He fears that the library will be a dumping ground for outdated materials that
will make foreign donors feel good but fail to re-create a credible resource
center at one of the Middle East’s most important universities.

Another issue is just getting goods to the war-torn city.
Shipments to the southern port of Basra have to be transported overland six
hundred miles to northern Mosul—a journey slowed by inefficiency, corruption,
government dysfunction and, still, the war. Where there’s a will there isn’t
always a way.

“People are asking me, ‘When are we going to start?’ ”
Hermi said. “We could start tomorrow. But I want a guarantee that the
books will not get stuck in Basra.”

Mosul Eye recalled the tense early days of Isis rule
on campus—and the debate over Shakespeare. Isis wanted to ban
the Bard. “One professor argued that’s how we teach English,” Mosul Eye told
me. “Isis asked us, ‘But what could Shakespeare teach Muslims? He
can’t teach them how to fight.’ ”

The historian added, “Our message about the library is not
only about books but to tell Isis that we are alive and that
you can’t kill us or ideas—by Shakespeare or anyone else.”